Letters to the Editor
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Why doesn't Ms. Rockwell put her neck on the line, in print?
C'mon Page. Have you or haven't you? Be rave!
Readers, discuss.
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Messy Lives
I've had an abortion. and I think women's rights are important. But, to state the obvious, abortion is a terrible thing to go experience. It isn't cool. It's a private grief. It isn't something to broadcast on a T-Shirt. It isn't a cheesy slogan. Like “I had a great time at the abortion clinic today” or “Guess where I where I went over spring break ?“ Yes, standing up for women's rights is important. But trivializing, or diminishing, an agonizing life changing choice is not the way to go about it. I am not proud of the loss that I’ve had; I’m grief stricken. I’ve often found that having a normal human ambivalence about this issue is not ok with activists on either side.
That day, when I was in the recovery room, after the abortion, a women who was less sick than me stood up to leave and the nurse said flippantly “oh I wouldn’t want to waste my day, either.” As if the woman had just stopped in to pick up her dry cleaning. The woman turned around for a moment to stare at the nurse. She said “I hope I never see you again” and slammed the door.
“Say it sister” are the exact words that I thought then, as I leaned over to throw up again. In the sobriety of our collective personal grief I can see that we do need to stand up for this choice, but we need to stand up together, in solidarity for our complex and messy lives, in a manner more befitting the gravity of the issue than a cheap trivializing T shirt.
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Post-abortion trauma...
Rachel said:
when anti abortion activists talk about the shame and regret women suffer as a result of abortion, i always wonder if they realize how much of it is their fault, a result of the vicious things shouted at vulnerable women at clinics across the nation.
Yes, this. Exactly. I had an abortion after my IUD failed. My daughter was four, my son was a baby, and I could not face another traumatic C-section and another child. I am nearly finished with a graduate program that I have devoted years of my life to. I could not complete it with another child - two is pushing it. My husband did not want another child and was completely supportive of my decision to end the pregnancy. Of course it was difficult, in part because of the overheated rhetoric that surrounds this issue. But it was the right choice for our family. My husband has been sterilized and we have told almost no one about our experience. I won't sign the petition because I am worried about the implications for me and for him, professionally and personally.
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Timelady
"but as someone who has not had an abortion, i tried to join my sisters. Somewhat cynically, it would not allow me to submit without credit card details."
That's bull - I had no problem with the 'Support my Sisters' option and not donating via the web.
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I said it here!
http://www.imnotsorry.net/
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No Answer Blog
Question, No Answer Blog: What, exactly, is a fucking FOETUS? Or do you mean "fetus"?
And by the way, what's your point?
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Bone to Pick,
Considering we now know for a fact that a fetus of any stage, even a neonate of several months, is incapable of either cognition or purposeful action, facts we've determined through analysis of EKGs that demonstrate their forebrain is not running, can we at last bury the canard that a fetus "wants to live" or attempts to escape an abortion? The movements of a fetus are reflex action that do not involve the brain or any of its subsidiaries, only the local nerves. Same goes for its processing of "pain," it has no awareness and cannot perceive pain, the firing of pain signals from local nerves accomplishes nothing beyond a reflex action. Hence, when cut, the fetus will jerk away from the cutting implement. Not even neonate smiling in the first few months is a deliberate action expressing a mood, they are still incapable of emotional response, crying and smiling are triggered by the brainstem in response to repeatable stimulus. No thought occurs, no opinions. If you could telepathically ask a fetus if it wanted to live, you'd receive a dial tone. When people insist on making the same debunked claims after irrefutable proof has emerged, their rhetoric smacks of lying.
When the pro-life movement claims to speak for those without voice, they keep neglecting to mention that they're putting their words into the mouths of those who have no opinions or desires whatsoever of their own. Sounds innately dishonest to me.
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defixiones
I too had issues with the Stand With My Sisters option, and it would not let me proceed without a credit card. I suspect it may be some sort of technical glitch. But alas, not total bs.
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I'm signing the petition
I took a 19-year-old I'd had in Bible study for three years to have an abortion. She already had three kids and had just started to turn her life around, get her GED and a job, and knew she couldn't handle another baby when her eldest was only three and the youngest seven months. I went with her and helped her pay for it, because indigent women can't access abortion, and when it got out at church, was I in the shit.
But I don't regret it for a minute because she's thriving and working and doing her best to do well by her three little boys, (and she's discovered birth control) and her oldest started preschool this week. I helped deliver him when he was born, and helped support him when she was a scared 15-year-old. And *that* is being pro-life, not yelling outside a clinic. And so, I hope, is helping her with the abortion so that the three babies she already had might have a decent shot.
I'm definitely signing the petition.
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Abortion
It's so much easier when there's consensus on an issue, such as with, say, slavery.
We're not there on abortion - either way. It's one thing to have a law, and another to have moral consensus.
And moral consensus is not close.
The bottom line is that the abortion opponents are as unlikely to change their view that life begins at conception and therefore abortion is murder than abolitionists were likely to change their view that black people were equal human beings and therefore slavery was wrong.
The gray areas such as in vitro fertilized eggs are as unlikely to make pro-life people support abortion as gray areas such as the fact we still have terrible prisons, which also are unfair to blacks, or that our government still causes torture of human beings are to make anti-slavery people support slavery.
Let's see how the statement of one abortion opponent reads when you use the slavery issue, from the pro- side:
"Furthermore, for any of you who have said that the decision to have a slave is difficult, therefore wrong, you are arrogant. Who are you to say that another person's decision is hard or not? Frankly, if a white person chooses to have a slave, it's nobody else's business and it's not up to anyone else to tell that white person how they *should* feel about the act. It's none of your business so butt out."
Should people who see the acts as immoral have an interest in 'butting in' to save black people dehumanized by slavery rights supporters, but not in butting in to save conceived human beings dehumanized by abortion rights supporters? Is there any more basis for that distinction that how you feel about the issues?
It's easy when there's consensus. We're not there.
We are, however, probably one republican Supreme Court appointment from Roe being revisited.
And even many legal experts who support abortion rights seem to suggest that the legal merit of Roe for protecting abortion is questionable. The rights of human beings to be protected without regard to race was recognized by a constitutional amendment; there is no such amendment one way or the other for fetuses, leaving the argument open for the issue to be decided legislatively, just as slavery could have been left in the law by Congress but for the constitutional amendment.
Regarding the social stigma, I'm imagining former slave owners and those who supported their rights wearing t shirts following the civil war saying that they had owned a slave, to remove the stigma. The stigma exists not for a lack of t shirts, but because many in society view the choice as one which has grave moral problems.
Those issues don't go away over a t shirt. The 'visible' is effective not when there's an informed difference of principles, but rather when there's uninformed bigotry; it works somewhat for gays because of how the culture was such that many Americans were simply unaware of the extent to which people are gay in America. It was useful just for people to realize how many people are gay, and how they did not choose to be gay, to better inform their opinions. Such ignorance doesn't exist much on abortion; people on both sides are basically informed, and have different views.
Some on the left (I know of none on the right) feel that the decision to join the military and kill whoever you are ordered to kill is an immoral choice. There is a stigma for killing, perhaps in Viet Nam or Iraq, among this group. Returning vets could wear 'I killed an Iraqi' t shirts, but it wouldn't likely change views much.
T shirts are more designed to help the people themselves feel less doubt about their choice, IMO.
But they're not any sort of answer to the fact that, as slavery seperate the nation for a century, abortion now seperates the nation, if far less violently but still to a great extent politically, with little room for reconciliation or compromise by either side on the horizon.